How to perform a 5-minute page speed/revenue analysis of your ecommerce site

I proselytize the value of performance for a living. I am a member of the tribe that believes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that improving the performance of your website will make you more money. I have dozens of stats at my disposal to convince you, and I feel an evangelical need to save non-believers from their errant ways.

Sometimes I’m confronted by non-believers who have the audacity to question my army of statistics and feel that the results at Amazon, Bing, Microsoft, Ebay, Shopzilla, AutoAnything, etc. do not apply to them.

I was confronted with one of these non-believers last week. In this case, he was a non-believer who was open enough to spend time brainstorming how the data could be presented in a way that would be more convincing. I am proud to say that he came out the other side as a serious performance convert. I want to share his conversion story.

“These stats don’t apply to me.”

I hear this a lot and I get it. It’s difficult for mortal companies to see themselves in relation to ecommerce mega-giants like Amazon and Ebay. This is why we put together stats on mortal companies.

But even those stats didn’t feel comparable for my skeptical comrade. He wanted to get an idea for how his site speed affects his users on his site with his content. Fair enough. My challenge was to figure out how to do this.

The obvious answer was to just implement Site Optimizer, speed things up, then check out conversion rate changes using a segmentation test, but this wasn’t an option. He needed to get buy-in before we could run a test implementation.

It was a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. After much discussion, we decided to find proxies in his current analytics program that might convince him that performance would make him more money.